Blogs we follow

September 28, 2008

Don't know if you follow Ben Worthen's usually insightful blog on WSJ.com...as you might expect from following this blog, I don't agree with him or the mostly evolutionarily-challenged posters that inexplicably agree with his premise that Cloud is just a lot of fog. If you want a dose of classic FUD (fear uncertaintly and doubt) re where software is headed, check this out

And for a good view of why Larry feels this way, all you have to do is add up all of those zeros behind the 20%+ yearly maintenance fees that continue to prop-up software and application companies. Here is Larry's own Co-President: “We get to keep virtually all of that money,” said Oracle Co-President
Safra Catz. Sure, some of that goes to customer service, but Catz said
that mostly customers are paying for access to the new software – and
Oracle is going to develop that new software regardless of whether
customers pay them maintenance fees. For Oracle, maintenance is pretty
much free money, about $10.5 billion worth in its 2008 fiscal and about
$1.5 billion more than that this year. “When many customers just send
you money for something you’re doing anyway, you literally can’t help
[but increase profits],” said Catz.

You can't make this stuff up... if there was any doubt about what these companies are poo-pooing Cloud it is for this reason.

September 12, 2008

We have word that the U. S. Patent and Trade Office has approved a application by
Google that outlines a scheme to build a giant floating data
center powered by ocean energy in the form of waves, tides and currents.

"Pelamis machines are giant, linked semi-submerged
cylindrical parts that produce electricity when wave motions drive a
hydraulic system that includes electrical generators. Pelamis has built
a 2.25-megawatt wave energy farm off the coast of Portugal."

It makes a huge amount of sense to co-locate datacenters and alternative power sources, as it's typically far cheaper to move electrons than atoms. This idea can be extended to others forms of alternative power, for example wind and solar. The trick with these, it would seem will be how to dispatch the workloads in the datacenter to "sync" these loads with the availability of power from these intermittent sources. Hmmm...I smell another patent....or better, startup!

Early indications are that starting up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) didn't actually end all life as we know it...at least not in the 4 dimensions I am familiar with (see String Theory Simplified )

But my new bud Kirill Sheynkman,
head of Cloud start-up Elastra, said (via itWorldCanada) that this sounds a lot like the early adopters of grid computing , the Web. 2.0 start-ups who want to get up and running quickly and without a
lot of capital expense, independent software vendors that want to
offer their applications in a software-as-a-service model, and
enterprises who have selected specific applications for the cloud, such
as salesforce automation or human resources.

Kirill goes on to say that “Equipment
inside the corporate data centre isn't going away anytime soon,” added
Sheynkman. Companies remain reluctant, for a variety of reasons, to
trust the cloud for their mission-critical applications. This includes
issues around licencing, compliance, interoperability, data privacy and
security.

Now this is scary...a recent post in InfoWorld "Cloud computing may draw government action" explains that as cloud computing becomes increasingly popular, policy makers will
debate issues such as the privacy and security of data in the cloud...what do you think?